Label: Ad Noiseam Format: 12″
Forsaking his love of distended gabba-ragga-breakcore noise for something not entirely unrelated, Jason Kohnen has applied his carefully-crafted breaks and furious percussive cut-up skills to grindcore metal – and what a rushing mashup the result is too. Big riffs meet monster bass and hyperspeed rhythms, twisting an already evil-sounding form into new shapes of enthusiastically demented chaos. Track titles like “Bloody Cenotaph” hint at the doomy mood which sweeps through the EP like a dose of particularly metallic-tasting amphetamine.
Guitar samples plundered from a host of sources probably including but not limited to Slayer, Godflesh, Extreme Noise Terror, Celtic Frost, Voivod, etc., etc. swarm around flickering, sometimes stuttering loops and sequences summoning the sound of death metal reanimated in the Twenty-first Century. “Jo Bench” is naturally dedicated to Bolt Thrower‘s bass player, and sounds like it should be too. The slow morbid grind which opens “Dstrctv” stumbles into blenched out and rewound beats made fat with distortion then sullied afresh with squirming electronic throbs and drones before petering out somewhat. “Ram Waster” picks up the challenge of putting handclap motifs and ugly Junglist rinses hard up against the heaviest of riffs and some classic throat-mangling from collaborator Kriss – or is it a horror flick sample or ten made yet more evil-sounding? Like Ultraviolence before him, Bong-Ra has thrown gabba and metal into the blender with even more shattering results – it’s the sort of sound which demands a huge stack of speakers and a crowd of frenzied loons stage diving off them while making devil horns as they plummet into the throng.
The last two tracks are remixes, Doormouse taking “Grindkrush” apart as an apocalyptic arhythmia of broken beats and hoarsely vile shouts, the whole writhing with pitchshifted guitars and software-sundered riffs pounded into submission in a welter of bit-stripping and maniac processing. Sickboy‘s disembowelling of “Painkiller” practically vomits itself into an abyss of rewound and spluttering guitar breaks with a single-minded fervour which is at once blisteringly noisy and unafraid of throwing in enough dancefloor stops, turns and incongruous snippets to keep the listener spinning.
-Linus Tossio-
